Abundance

In December 1912 Paris turned out for the sale of Henri Rouart's collection. Rouart was an engineer who had made his money in industry, a painter in his spare hours and one of Degas's oldest friends, and at that sale a ballet picture by Degas set a record price for a work by a living painter. This canvas by Prud'hon was lot 62, and the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston bought it.

It is unfinished. The museum reads the subject as an allegory. Abundance holds out a cornucopia, the horn of plenty, to a woman in the high-waisted dress of the Empire, a figure from Prud'hon's own day rather than from myth. The date can only be given broadly, between about 1812 and 1820.

When Prud'hon died in 1823, the picture passed to his friend and pupil Charles Boulanger de Boisfremont, a painter to whom he had left his portfolios of drawings and studies. Boisfremont's daughter later gave it to the collector Laurent Laperlier, who lent it to the Prud'hon exhibition at the École des Beaux-Arts in 1874. Two years later the writer Edmond de Goncourt listed it in his catalogue of Prud'hon's work.